Comment by lumost

This is not an accurate description. The first identified patients were people working in or living near a "wet market" where (among other things) various wild animals were sold. It's plausible that someone was infected somewhere else and the market was only the site of a "superspreader event" (rather than the earliest jump from some other animal to humans), but further details are speculative, informed by indirect phylogenetic evidence rather than direct forensic evidence.

It's not unusual/unexpected that there were labs working on coronavirus research in several major Chinese cities: the 2002 SARS outbreak, which began in southern China and caught researchers and public health officials off guard, led to significant investment in the study of coronaviruses.

Virus outbreaks are usually first recognized in large cities. Most large Chinese cities have labs that study coronaviruses. They were established in response to SARS-CoV-1 in the early 2000s.

So no matter where it comes from the chances are good a coronavirus outbreak will first be detected in a city that has a coronavirus lab.

> But it is awfully strange that the first patients of a novel pandemic coronavirus were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus.

Except - as far as I know - the first patients weren’t.

Even when there’s not a direct connection, it’s usually a good sign to take a look at what’s going on. In this case, even if COVID was a random isolated mutation in an unrelated marketplace nearby, it shone a spotlight on a place doing gain of function research on novel coronaviruses where if one did escape lab confinement, we were woefully unprepared to deal with the full consequences of that outbreak (eg: COVID). Whether or not the lab leak theory is true, we should be taking exactly the same precautions as if it were.

> when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection

If the alternative hypothesis is that the events are independent, yes. But it is somewhat more common to have labs studying viruses in regions where there are virus reservoirs. So the events "lab studying viruses" and "virus outbreak in local area" are not independent, as both are more likely in regions with viral reservoirs, and in particular, in dense urban areas thereof. A coincidence is not as extraordinary as it may seem.

Thing is, it is not possible to know at this point, as long as the virus does not seem to be bioengineered, whether it was a lab accident while studying animal samples or an outbreak starting in the market.

Were they first patients?

What are the two extraordinarily improbable events here? There's a novel virus capable of causing a pandemic getting into humans, and then... what's the other one?

Beyond reasonable doubt doesn't mean impossible,any more than on the balance of probabilities means beyond reasonable doubt.

> “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”

That's how people start believing in supernatural explanations and conspiracy theories, though. Improbable events happen all the time; just because each event is improbable doesn't mean the set of improbable events that can occur isn't large.

Weird shit happens all the time, and we should expect it as a matter of random chance.

I think we've overcorrected.

For what it's worth, the "first patients were lab workers" part isn't established. What is documented is that the earliest cases cluster around the Huanan market. The lab workers attribution shouldn't be carrying the argument.

Before COVID, people were just unable to be roused out of their sleep about the dangers of cross-species virus transmission. "Wake me up when something important happens." By a certain standard nothing important had ever happened: so people slept on.

Then COVID hit. "Time to wake up." Suddenly people went from basically unconscious to hypervigilant overnight. Something which was a clear and present danger - the wet markets - looked uninteresting compared to the lab. Environmental samples taken there tested positive. In other words: don't sleep on the wet markets again - they are dangerous, then and now.

While paying attention was arguably an improvement over complete indifference, I don't think we landed in the right place.

Source on first patients being WIV workers? I think there was a US intelligence report that claimed several fell ill in Nov., some with incompatible symptoms, and with claims from WIV they didn't test positive for antibodies (not saying take those at face value). There's also the wet market and the sampling done in gutters around the different stalls and a whole competing story there, which is also the kind of scenario in the 2002 SARS outbreak.

> But it is awfully strange

Lazy, anti-science, conspiratorial way of going about it

>...were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus...

...with funding from a US group that discussed conducting this gain of function research in China using a spike protein at the furin cleavage site, a group whose members were appointed to come up with an explanation for what had happened.

[dead]

> I recently heard a scientist use a phrase something along the lines of “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”.

Dumbest thing I've heard today.

Ever since we started studying autism, we found it! Therefore studying causes autism.